President’s Message

This truly is a historic moment.

Creating Our Future: The Campaign for Skidmore will be remembered decades from now as a defining moment for Skidmore College .

The thanks we want to convey, the gratitude, for this achievement are profound . I want to start with our four Campaign co-chairs: Nancy W . Hamilton ’77 and W . Scott McGraw P’12, the original co-chairs of the campaign when it was first conceived and launched, and Tom Wilmot ’99 and Susan Gottlieb Beckerman ’67, who assumed the direction of the campaign in its final years .

To all our donors and volunteers — literally thousands and thousands of you, including alumni, parents, trustees, friends, staff and faculty, and students — you are the heart and soul of this campaign .

And to my predecessor, Phil Glotzbach, and his wife Marie Glotzbach, who guided Skidmore in the decade leading up to this campaign, as well as through the campaign’s many steps and triumphs, the gratitude I feel for all you accomplished for Skidmore is beyond measure .

For I came late to this party . This campaign was some 2,700 days in the making, and I’ve been here for about 270 days — so more or less 10% of the campaign . As I’ve said on other occasions, I feel like I was brought in to pitch, not even the last inning of this game, but maybe the last pitch to the last batter . Yet these were important pitches . In the final six months of the campaign, when we decided to extend it by half a year to bring it to the strongest conclusion we could, we raised an additional $17 .4 million —over 13% of the campaign total in the final six months . This gave me a chance to work right alongside the campaign leadership and our superb Advancement colleagues, and that has indeed been an honor and a great education in how to do this work well .

The success of the current campaign tells us something about Skidmore’s future . Creating Our Future has not just been a great achievement in itself; it shows what Skidmore can accomplish and augurs so well for our future . That future, I can tell you, is aspirational and ambitious . And so, at this moment of celebration and triumph, it’s a fair question to ask: “Where do we go from here?”

When I think about Skidmore’s future, I think about our people . Students, staff, faculty, alumni, parents — it’s the people who make an institution, who define its qualities and traditions . I want us to think carefully about how our people experience Skidmore — about the lived experience of being a student or employee of this great College . And I want our future goals to be connected to that experience, connected to our people . One of the stories we will tell about the Year of COVID at Skidmore is how well we took care of our people . The health, safety, and well-being of everyone in our community have unfailingly been our top priority throughout the pandemic and will continue to be . This is the springboard to our future .

For the magic formula for being a great liberal arts college is actually pretty simple: you recruit the most talented, diverse, and brilliant students you can to come to Skidmore; and then you give to them a world-class liberal arts education that is just about unmatched in the world .

So our enduring question will be, what are the priorities, projects, and programs that will help us continue to fulfill that magic formula?

It takes courage, for that’s a highly aspirational formula . It takes commitment, for what it takes to accomplish this is not easy nor cheap . It takes collaboration — nobody can do this alone, and the depth of talent and effort we will depend upon is great indeed .

And finally, it takes love . Love of the alma mater . Love of what it has done for and meant to so many of us . And love for what it will do for the students of the future .

Being in higher education is a matter of infinite hope. We commit to it because we believe in that future and the role that great colleges like Skidmore play in shaping a better and more lasting future. That love is what drove this campaign to such a triumphant conclusion. And that love is what will sustain Skidmore for generations to come.

Marc C . Conner President

Excerpted from Campaign Celebration Event April 8, 2021

Office of Advancement

815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

skidmore.edu